The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Thoughts For Accusers On Twitter

Posted on | August 16, 2017 | Comments Off on Thoughts For Accusers On Twitter

by Smitty

On twitter tonight, I replied to Rick Wilson’s quotation of Robert E. Lee’s descendants, and opened the floodgates:

  • I simply muted those calling me a Nazi almost immediately.
  • Then there were those who attempted to make this about Heather Heyer, the paralegal tragically killed.
  • Then there were those attempting to shame me for having “Christian” as the first word on my profile.

What a bunch of bullies. Sure: it was overwhelming, and I stepped away from the keyboard. Leave them their tactical victory.

It makes sense to compose a blog post at a distance. It’s more satisfying to reply at length to the accusers.

There is little hope that they will read it in an open-minded way (that one might have thought a ‘liberal’ would insist upon) though. If read at all, one anticipates that this will be cherry-picked for further insult-hurling.

Nevertheless, here are some points for consideration, Ye Peanut Gallery:

  1. Jesus of Nazareth has been the meaning of life for almost 40 years now to me. He died for every human being having the 23 chromosome pairs we all do at conception, when we are uniquely ourselves.
  2. About half that time was spent in the Navy, supporting and defending the Constitution. Also, the right of people to behave as ignorantly as they wish on free services like Twitter.
  3. If you support the Bill of Rights, you should recoil at efforts to adjudicate who is permitted to speak, irrespective of the boneheaded ugliness of the speech. Let us judge our own speech, and minimize offense, while accepting the right of even the most morally polluted to spill forth their ideas, within the bounds of the law.
  4. Thus, I cannot accept the Orwellian efforts to:
    • Privilege one foul group over another. The Alt-Right and Antifa are more similar than disparate.
    • Divide humanity into racial groups for purposes of denigrating others–Jesus personally, explicitly, rejected racism.

I forgive, in advance, anybody who refuses to accept these words at face value. I expect to stand accused of:

  • Lying outright.
  • Not meaning what I say.
  • Meaning what I say, but having some unfortunate psychological impairment where things I don’t consciously mean lurk beneath my words and somehow undermine them.

Again, I forgive my accusers. Lacking the concept of objective Truth, even an imperfect attempt at communicating some Truth to the accusers is doomed. As long as you understand that the accusers themselves are not the audience (God is) then this is not a big deal.

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