ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto

[Xugumad]

Undertoad
I guess the point is that I'm not really all that concerned with WHY they want to kill me.

Then you can't make any judgement call about their culture, their history, their political system, their society, their current belief systems, and their motivations. You cannot claim any sort of moral right. You are aware that you could 'know more', but you refuse to. Willful ignorance equals moral inferiority, simple as that.

If they want to kill me, that is enough.

They are of course wrong in wanting to kill you; but to use willful ignorance as a shield from finding out the reason why somebody would reach a state in which he wants your death is criminally narrow-minded.

I'm not going to fucking study why I should be killed or enslaved.

Maybe they want to kill you because your government is helping enslave their people? Maybe they want to kill you because your government is spending 1/3rd of its foreign aid to a state that has made racism its modus operandi, with their brethren - some of them completely innocent of anything - as the target?

Does that make their methods right? No, of course not. Does it make you incredibly ignorant for having

1. The education
2. The financial means (computer, internet)
3. The benefit of a democratic society to exist in
4. The gift of free speech and thought

and throwing it all away in blind hatred, rather than seeking to understand? Learning doesn't equal CONDONING, but in your hatred you don't want to know. Willful ignorance is your shield, assumed moral superiority resulting from that ignorance is your weapon. How does that make you different from a radical islamist who doesn't want to know about democracy and science and women's rights and history, and all the good things about the US, merely seeing his people blown up with American weapons and subdued with American money, deciding to blow up the WTC?

That's right. It doesn't. Ignorance is ignorance. Death is death. Wishing death on other without learning is wrong, either way. Stupidity is stupidity. Closing your eyes out of your own desire is the first link in the chain of terror.

To me, after they decide they want to kill me, their philosophy is no longer deserving of study. It's deserving of termination wth extreme prejudice.

Thus, escalation begins. Unless you are willing to commit genocide, you are the second step in a never-ending war of hate and ignorance.

It's fairly typical, actually, in the current anti-intellectual climate we are living in; seeking to know more and THEN making your judgement is condemned in favour of blind blanket condemnations. That may just be the reason why I find posting here subjected to increasing hostility: the praising of an anti-"idiotarian" manifesto, broadly painting all of different beliefs as idiots, is just another example of the aforementioned climate.

MaggieL
Doggonit, I must have missed the episode where self-defense became immoral

Oh dear. I must have missed the episode where murdering hundreds, if not thousands of innocent civilians who can barely read or write in a Third World country, lest alone organize resistance against their dictatorial oppressors, became immoral.

It happened. It'll happen again. Where does self-defense end, and murder begin? How smart are those smart bombs really?

Self-defense ends the second you kill an innocent. If you want to seek the high moral ground, try not to kill any children. I forgot. It was the Iraqi and Afghani peasant children's fault that the WTC was blown to bits. They deserved to die.

X.