Hate

I just banned another commenter.  This pretty much never happens unless the commenter is a spammer.  That's not the case this time.  This time the commenter was banned because he advocates killing police officers.

I find it interesting that this happened on the same day that I was pointed to this article:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating An Entire Generation Of Fascists. Excerpt:

Like the far-right that they claim to be so staunchly opposed to, the far-left is based entirely around hate. Humans are perpetual morons who always need a bad guy. To neo-Nazis, the bad guys are Jews, "degenerates", and non-whites. To SJWs, the bad guys are people like Communismkills: not only is she a white person who isn't self-flagellating, but she's also a woman who doesn't see herself as a victim of some evil patriarchal conspiracy. To an SJW, that's heresy: all white people are evil and all women are victims. If a woman doesn't think that she's a victim, then she has "internalized misogyny" and she just doesn't know any better, so she needs SJWs to speak on her behalf. Likewise, if a black person doesn't tow(sic) the SJW line exactly, then they will be immediately labeled an "Uncle Tom" or "house nigger" by the extremely patronizing SJWs who see minorities as nothing more than political props and tools and who view all races as monoliths with intrinsic characteristics (which, ironically, is the absolute definition of racism).

Read the whole thing.  It's sickening, but informative.  I'm reminded once again of philosopher Eric Hoffer's seminal work The True Believer, and his observation on hate:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealousies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: "No.... We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one." F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: "It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can't, because we haven't got any Jews."

Another example of this came today in another article, Salem on the Thames: What Connecticut College's Andrew Pessin Affair Teaches Us. Dr. Andrew Pessin's story is an illuminating example of one college campus fusing and coalescing into one flaming mass of hatred. He'll be lucky to get another teaching job anywhere. He's been made an unperson, much like Dr. Walter Palmer, the dentist who killed a lion in Zimbabwe.

This all goes back to the piece I linked in this morning's post, Balkanization Part II, and even more to a piece I wrote the better part of ten years ago, Reasonable People.

The fabric of civil society is has been fraying noticeably for a while.  How much longer before it begins to shred?  I'm not taking any bets.