Stuck on Stupid: Progressive Facebook edition (Part 2)
It’s not a very deep dive to plumb the depths of Leftist intellectual positions on most issues, but it’s still a worthwhile exercise to expose the fallacies that they use to try to dominate the debate on pressing issues — with the most pressing issue being whether to admit Syrian refugees. The easiest place for me to find examples of Leftist thought is my Facebook feed. Because I’ve spent my life in Blue enclaves, almost all of my friends — and they are really nice people in day-to-day interactions — are Progressives. It gives me pleasure to deconstruct some of their more foolish or vicious posters:
I have to admit that these first two posters are my favorite “stupid Progressive Facebook” posts. Because Thanksgiving is coming up, both chide anti-refugee conservatives for forgetting that the first Thanksgiving came about because the indigenous people in North America extended a welcoming hand to European immigrants.
Whenever I’ve seen one of these posters pop up on my Facebook feed, I’ve left a polite comment to the effect that we all learned in public school (thanks to Howard Zinn and others) that the Europeans, once having gotten a foothold in North America, promptly turned around and murdered as many Native Americans as possible. If they couldn’t murder them, they dispossessed them of their land and otherwise marginalized them. There’s certainly a lesson to be learned here but the lesson isn’t to welcome refugees, it’s to cry out “For God’s sake, don’t let them in!”
The next poster makes sense if you live in an alternate universe in which “open-carry gun nuts” have committed mass shootings in America (they haven’t), set off bombs in Boston (they haven’t), shot up Marine recruiting centers (they haven’t), flown planes into buildings (they haven’t), blown up trains in Spain (they haven’t), shot up hotels in Mumbai (they haven’t), massacred people in Paris (they haven’t), massacred a mall in Kenya (they haven’t), bombed nightclubs in Bali (they haven’t), and generally spread a swath of destruction across the entire Middle East, which increasing inroads on the rest of the world (they haven’t). But otherwise the poster makes perfect sense.
Two points about this next poster: First, I am always tempted to point out that, since Jobs was an unwanted baby, the Progressives’ prescription for him would have been abortion. Second, it’s unlikely that Jobs would have been the man he was if he was raised in an Islamic environment, something that will be happening to the offspring of the refugees being urged upon us.
The following poster is a more subtle one than many are: I don’t recall anyone saying refugee kids aren’t people. Indeed, I think many Americans would open their homes to refugee children, provided that those refugee children were completely assimilated, rather than raised in the Muslim enclaves in which they’ll inevitably be placed.
The problem, as can be seen from the pictures immediately following this poster, is that too many Muslims raise their children to be human bombs. This goes back to a point I’ve been making for years, which is that when you have a totally corrupt ideology or a completely controlling tyrannical leader, it’s always the children that will suffer — and the only way to end the suffering is to free the children from the ideology and the leader, something that is invariably a deadly process.
I’ve seen gosh knows how many variations of the following poster, which is to say that, because in 1939 we turned away the S.S. St. Louis, a ship with 908 Jews, half of whom died in the Holocaust, we are now honor-bound to take in tens of thousands of Muslim refugees over the next few years. This is just wrong. As briefly as I can:
(1) Thanks to the Nazis impeccable record-keeping, the U.S. knew exactly who these Jewish refugees were. We have no way of knowing who any of the Syrian refugees are.
(2) There was nothing in the 1930s or the 1920s to indicate that Jews were terrorists. They had not committed terrorist acts or made terrorist threats either in Europe or America.
(3) Jewish religious doctrine does not advocate Holy War or the establishment of some type of Jewish caliphate.
(4) 903 people is not the same as 10,000 people this year and who knows how many thousands next year.
(5) Jews were being expressly targeted for genocide. Obama is refusing refugee status to the Christians in the Middle East who are targeted for genocide. The Syrians (and many who are not Syrian) simply, and not unreasonably, want to get out of a war zone — but that’s not a good reason for the U.S. to put itself at risk.
(6) Leftists like to say that no refugee has committed a terrorist act here. As I explain in Stuck on Stupid (Part 1), this is a half truth at best.
The following two posts conflate common sense and constitutional rights, on the one hand, with hypocrisy, on the other hand. First, of course, the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms. If the Left wants to do away with guns, it had better get together a constitutional convention. Otherwise, the guns stay.
Second, guns are mere tools. Domestic gun massacres are not done in thrall to some “gun supremacy” doctrine. They are carried out by crazy people — usually Democrats, or from Democrat households, and usually on drugs given to control natural boyish behavior in school — and the gun is merely a tool.
In the case of the refugees, common sense and events in Europe make it entirely reasonable to believe that a significant percentage of refugees support ISIS or other hardcore Islamic groups (Hezbollah, al Qaeda, etc.), and that a smaller, but still significant percentage plan to commit terrorist acts themselves. They are not “a few madmen.” They are ideologues in thrall to an ideology that has claimed tens of thousands of lives around the world in the past fourteen years.
Regarding the next poster, I’d love to have the person who thought this one up — and all the ones who reposted it — take into their home some nice ISIS terrorist. I think it would be good for them.
(You can find Part 1 here.)
