empathy

A Terrorist State?

by MyBaconPress

Well, at least he was being even-handed. Felon 47 actually imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs. He hit everywhere. EVERYWHERE! Including a couple of islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands. He’s HAD it with them giving us the business when it comes to trade. Unless it’s about Fentanyl. I’m not sure anymore. He’s not either, because of the Adderall. Still, he’s not going to STAND for it one day longer. He named those two islands specifically. Called ’em out, you might say. Every single person who lives there can see that the US isn’t playing around anymore!

And IF anybody actually lived there, they’d probably be upset at the destabilization of the trade relationship. But since nobody does – live there, I mean – the locals (Penguins) probably didn’t notice. To be perfectly clear: he imposed tariffs on penguins! Sometimes, I get genuinely concerned this guy doesn’t know what he’s doing…

Oh, it’s not just me, either. The Drumpfster’s mind-boggling boggled mind is destabilizing the dollar. The dollar is, well, was, the world reserve currency. In simplest terms, that means EVERYONE wanted/needed dollars because the dollar was so dependable, so strong, so… safe. Well, not with Donny driving, it isn’t.

The headline in the Guardian this morning read, “US dollar ‘at risk of confidence crisis’ as Trump tariffs rattle global markets.” Other countries are abandoning the dollar altogether, now. Increasingly, they’re turning toward the Yuan. That’s Chinese money. Donny’s hat is wrong. He’s making China great again. He’s pushing AMERICA into a depression. (I know I’M depressed…)

Mostly, I just believe he really doesn’t understand. I suspect he honestly thinks this will work. Someone told him there would be “market adjustments” so he doesn’t CARE about the crashing economy or your 401k. He thinks it will just be short-term pain. Respected economists think we’re on our way to a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread.

On the other hand, he IS an evil son-of-a-bitch. One cannot discount that. He and his evil buddies might well have a profit scheme dreamed up that involves the ultimate “bust out,” the United States of America. He and his buddies end up with trillions in Yuan (NO, he’s not buying dollars. Those things are useless. What are you, crazy?) and the vast majority of Americans will be left with nothing…

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The right seems to have found a new bogeyman to expose and expunge: empathy. Empathy is a noun. It means, ‘The ability to identify with or understand another’s situation or feelings.’ I guess there’s a concern that some MAGA might start to wonder what it FEELS LIKE to be whisked off of the street, held without charge, put on a plane, and flown to a maximum security prison without EVER being charged, let alone convicted, to “serve your time.” How MUCH time? No one can say. There IS no crime, so there IS no statute. Technically, you’ve been “disappeared.”

I kind of couldn’t believe it when I first heard about it. I mean, who thought they needed THAT? I see a ‘lack of empathy’ as entry level stuff for MAGA, a basic requirement. Yet, they’re starting to talk publicly about how empathy is weakness. Elon Musk went on the Joe Rogan show and said, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” All right, so Musk is a greed-blinded moron whom one would NEVER mistake for a decent or moral human being. Oh, AND, he has autism. It’s EASY to believe he can’t quite grasp the concept of empathy. I doubt he could do to people what he’s doing to people if he could. But among the leaders of that anti-empathy movement? “Christian” Nationalists.

The quotes around ‘Christian’ are about me not accepting them AS Christians.
“Hey! Who are YOU to judge my relationship with Jesus?”
“I’m a guy who can read your storybook and understand what it says, then watch your behavior and compare the two. When they don’t align, I draw conclusions, like it or not. When everything you do, say, think, and feel is the exact opposite of the teachings of Jesus, you just don’t qualify as Christian, no matter WHAT you call yourself. Maybe start with John 13:15…”

For those of us not so familiar with John 13:15, it says, “For I gave you an example, so that you also would do just as I did for you.” (That’s Jesus-talk for “I showed you how to behave. Do that.” They don’t, and I “discern.”) But maybe it’s just me, right? Maybe I misunderstood the message. No, I don’t think so. Here are some other examples from the “Christian” Nationalists:

JOSH MCPHERSON from the podcast ‘Family Talk’: “Empathy almost needs to be struck from the Christian vocabulary.”

ALLIE BETH STUCKEY from the podcast ‘Thinking In Public’: “Really, I think empathy as hoisted up as the highest virtue, or even a virtue at all – I think that really gets us into a really big mess.”

JOE RIGNEY, discussing his book, ‘The Sin Of Empathy,’: “Most people have a hard time imagining how empathy could ever be harmful. And therefore, if I’m the devil, where am I going to hide some of my most destructive tactics?”

Purging empathy, any possibility of empathy, is crucial to the next steps in the coup. They’re about to get outright cruel, as though they haven’t been evil enough already…
“Oh, Mark, you’re always so hyperbolic!”

In Better America, one could NOT just put someone on a plane and send them to prison in a foreign country. Just for emphasis: ‘SEND THEM TO PRISON’ in a foreign country! By definition, then, we haven’t been Better America since at least 2001, when the US started jailing people in Guantanamo Bay based on the idea that, while being tortured, someone had mentioned a name just like theirs. Nothing else, just that.

Now we’ve sent a planeload of people to a prison in El Salvador. No, I DIDN’T write about how they lost their court cases – because they didn’t GET court cases. THIS time, it isn’t ‘named under torture’ that got them tossed (permanently?) into prison. THIS time, it was the “crime” of having a tattoo on brown skin. Ooh, scary…

Human beings were summarily declared guilty and sent to a prison. The US paid that prison $6 million dollars to keep them. No trial. Just a payment. Prison. No, not just a prison. One of the most notoriously brutal prisons in the world. What was their crime? Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
“Uh-huh! They were members of a bad gang.”
“Oh, yeah? Prove it.”
“Well, we can’t…”
“Oh? And why is that?”
“It turns out, some of them weren’t really in that gang. But they were still in gangs!”
“Same answer: prove it.”
“No…”

The LAST time the cruelest incompetents misled the country, they kidnapped people’s children as a way to discourage them from coming to the US. We, the people – they did this in OUR name – never DID reunite some of those children with their families. We just… stole them. ‘Come to America, lose your children’, was the threat.

Now it’s ‘Come to America, end up in a brutal, El Salvadoran prison – for nothing.’
“Sneaking into this country illegally is a crime.”
“Yeah, a misdemeanor. Not usually maximum security prison stuff.”

They call it “Shock and Awe.” The idea is to use the threat of violence to coerce a civilian population in pursuit of an ideological goal. Hey, wait a minute. I’ve heard that before. Where have I– Oh, I remember! That’s the actual definition of ‘Terrorism,’ using violence or the threat of violence to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government in pursuit of political or ideological goals.

Thanks, MAGA. Donny’s only been in charge for just over two months, and already, the United States of America is, officially, a terrorist state! And you’re… cheering? I guess MAGA media doesn’t have to put TOO much effort into that “purge empathy” movement after all, eh?

On The Death of Human Empathy…

by MyBaconPress

There was a woman named Hannah Arendt. She was a German born political scientist and philosopher. She was also Jewish. She lived during – and was forced to flee from – the Nazi persecution of the 1930’s and 40’s. She had the same front-row-seat-view of the decline of a once-respectable, once-proud civilization the Americans are suffering these days.

This is from Britannica; “Arendt viewed the growth of totalitarianism as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. She argued that totalitarian regimes, through their pursuit of raw political power and their neglect of material or utilitarian considerations, had revolutionized the social structure and made contemporary politics nearly impossible to predict.”

It sure feels as though we’re living in an age where contemporary politics are nearly impossible to predict, doesn’t it? It’s all part of the effort to create a totalitarian regime here, in the US, and a key part to all of THAT is the slow perversion of morality, a kind of moral stupidity that prides itself on being impervious to facts. And the key to THAT decline is found in the elimination or suppression of empathy.

‘Empathy’ is a noun. It means, “The ability to identify with or understand another’s situation or feelings.” In short, it’s the ability to effectively put oneself into another’s shoes. I suspect those who eventually became MAGA started with a distinct lack of empathy in the first place. It traces to a smaller-than-average Amygdala, a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain. Researchers have discovered, for example, that psychopathic serial killers have a small Amygdala that connects poorly with the frontal lobe. They literally can not imagine how their victims feel.

Obviously, I don’t mean to suggest that all of MAGA are serial killers. It takes more than JUST a small Amygdala to make a psychopath, but a small Amygdala is requisite to reduced empathy and the entire right-wing propaganda machine was built to eliminate any vestiges of empathy that might remain. Sadly, that propaganda has been VERY effective.

I seriously doubt I COULD become MAGA, today. I mean, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I seriously doubt my ability to simply dismantle my morality so completely and all of a sudden. I mean, even MAGA didn’t do that. It took YEARS to make them the hard-hearted, and even hateful group they are today.

It literally started with word games. “Hey, let’s call the Inheritance Tax the ‘Death Tax!’ From there, they moved to lying, though they didn’t KNOW they were lying. They thought they were just playing the political game. The stories they told were for the greater good, right? Slowly, very slowly, they’ve been led, step by step, deeper down a rabbit hole of misinformation.

They became consumed by some VERY slick, VERY professional looking propaganda. Slowly, carefully, their fears became their guiding star. Whatever bigotry they harbored was enabled and enhanced and ultimately, approved. It didn’t happen quickly. It couldn’t have. But slowly, over time – 40 plus years, in fact – they’ve had whatever empathy they may once have enjoyed stolen from them.

The success of the would-be totalitarians is VERY dangerous to the United States and to the world, in general. The US has been the most powerful nation on Earth for 80 years. Now, we’re a huge toddler with a loaded gun. No, make that millions of loaded guns. And nukes. And all of it backed by “true believers,” unable to put themselves into the shoes of others.

It took a World War and some 60 million dead to stop the totalitarian regime Arendt was forced to flee, the Nazis, and nobody back then had the kind of weapons we have today. The policy called Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) used to be a warning in name. Now it seems to be a reality the world is hurtling toward with a rather insane abandon. Arendt had something to say about that. “The death of human empathy,” she wrote, “is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

For me, the most ironic part of the decline of empathy in our society is that the single largest group of people to lose sight of that aspect of the human condition are the people who call themselves Christians. They never even suspect that their callous attitudes about others run contrary to the most basic teaching of their ostensible leader. I mean Jesus, not Donny. They’re in lockstep with Donny.

Somewhere along the way, I sort of dropped the Ten Commandments as guiding rules. For one thing, there are really only five: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, and don’t covet. The others are just some form of “You have to like me best” from their “jealous God.”

More importantly, those that DO speak to morality can all be summed up in ONE teaching of Jesus. “So then, in everything treat others the same way you want them to treat you, for this is [the essence of] the Law and the [writings of the] Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12, the Amplified Bible)

Treat them the way you want them to treat you. Now there’s a concept. If you don’t want to be lied to, don’t lie. If you don’t want to be stolen from, don’t steal. See? Simple. If you don’t want to be ripped from your home and packed off in the middle of the night, maybe don’t support that behavior. It’s a nice little rule and it doesn’t even require empathy. One can be as selfish as anything and it still applies. You know what you don’t want someone else to do to you. Don’t do it to them. Easy.

The loss of empathy in a person does NOT preclude sympathy in that person, and that may be a key. While they can’t successfully put themselves into someone else’s shoes, they still understand distress when they, or someone they care about, experiences some consequence or effect. Honestly, I expect they will experience a whole new set of consequences and/or effects in the very near future. What I don’t know is if they’ll ever make the connection between their suffering and who is doing the actual infliction of that suffering.

Their media tells them the perpetrator is… well, whomever they can point to that isn’t the actual perpetrator. More to the point, they WANT to believe they’re on the side of righteousness. Who doesn’t? But their desire to NOT be the bad guy in this process may well prevent them from ever understanding or acknowledging their role as useful tools to the overthrow.

Those of us who never succumbed to the MAGA misinformation are all (foolishly, I fear) waiting for a cowboy on a white horse or a knight in shining armor to come in and rescue us. I don’t see any on the horizon. This is actually happening, whether we like it or not.

I don’t agree with everything Arendt has written or said, but I think she hit the nail on the head with her warning, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

I can see how easily we, the people, might fall into barbarism from where we are. Many already have. So it’s important for those of us still capable of empathy to hang on to it. Cling to it. Hold it close. The temptation will be there to disregard first the feelings of MAGA, then the person as a whole. It might seem the only way to cope, cut them off.

But YOUR empathy has to be the example. As a bonus, you MAY find that your empathy helps you cope with their LACK of empathy. Talk with them, but not about abstract concepts or people they don’t know. Share your experiences, how things affect YOU. Those are things they can relate to.

Empathy didn’t die of natural causes in this once-great nation. It was murdered. Slowly, steadily. Fortunately, not for everyone. We may be destined to barbarism. But maybe, just maybe, we can change the course. Set the example. Maybe OUR empathy will inspire a resurrection of empathy in someone else, one moment at a time, in one person at a time where it has been snuffed out. Empathy isn’t extinct so long as it exists in even one person, and it only takes a spark to get a fire going…