Frankly
A very sinister and cowardly disease is running rampant. But alt-left liberals love it. It is the ‘ad hominem’ disease. Literally, this means ‘to or towards or at the person’. For our purposes, it means directed against a person rather than his arguments and reasoning. In a broader sense, it means based on or appealing to emotion rather than reason. In other words, ‘I don’t have an argument to sustain my position so I will put down or smear you as a person’.
I was brought up to treat everyone with respect and to not attack the person but this virtue has almost gone out the door. There is something cowardly, gutless, dishonest, and inherently nasty about attacking someone with a different point of view to yours personally to avoid justifying your own position.
It is easy to pick. It manifests in a truckload of name-calling terms that have emerged over the last few decades. Such as racist, sexist, chauvinist, bigot, homophobic, fascist, xenophobic and more – in fact, any derogatory term they can get their hands on.
These are all intended to intimidate anyone with a different view into cowering in their corner and going away. It is designed to put down opposition so that people are intimidated from speaking up based on proper, proven, intergenerational truth values. It is a sinister form of bullying.
The signs are clear. The moment a racist, sexist, chauvinist, bigot, homophobic, fascist or alt-right slur is used, the user almost always cannot defend his or her argument with reason, let alone a calm discussion. Which usually means that their argument is poor.
Often people accused of being racist, sexist, chauvinistic, bigoted or homophobic are more than likely simply echoing religious and moral values. Also, people accused of being fascist and alt-right are often the very opposite, very balanced, fair, and reasonable. Certainly more discerning of the truth.
One interesting development is the emergence of people who hate being asked questions. They either know they have a weak case, or they have set their minds in concrete and do not want to be confused by facts and evidence. Ad hominem and obfuscation have become art forms.
How has this come about?
The primary cause is the incremental abandonment of principled truth values and standards, manners, ethics, morality, respect, self-respect, discipline, and self-discipline, just for a start. Sadly, people who have never seen these virtues do not know what they look like – or what they are missing.
As these values have fallen away, society has become less civilised.
In fact, by definition, because we have fallen so far away from these civilised values, we are lying when we call ourselves civilised.
Ignorance is another cause. We have greater scientific and technical knowledge than ever before in history – accompanied by proportionally greater ignorance. We live in a plastic, candyfloss, fast-foods, artificial society dominated by social media instead of real people relationships. The old statement remains true: What we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.
There are more reasons, such as fatherless families, the breakdown of families, the grog and drug cultures, the artificiality of the movie and television industries, and the pace of life. But the abandoning of proper values is the root cause that leads to the rest.
Having essentially discarded any worthwhile values, Western society has designed a range of man-made pseudo values to serve its purposes, amongst which are political correctness and misuse of human rights. Human rights, more often human wants, are false if not built on human responsibility.
We keep shifting the goalposts to suit what we want. We have developed a whole vocabulary of cowardly ‘put-down’ terms that we throw at anyone who has a different view.
If we were prepared to deal with principled values at the top of the cliff, the taxes we throw at mopping up the costs of law and order, education, health, and social welfare at the bottom of the cliff would reduce considerably.
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