Often in rhetoric, the implicit logic of a position is followed into absurdities, thus, the argument goes, illustrating the folly of the position. Going in the other direction is a little less popular, but can be used to argue that some cultural position is, if not absurd, at least flawed.
In this spirit, I present the subject of an e-mail from known lefty organization MoveOn.org:
Join us tomorrow: We deserve the full Mueller report NOW
Stop and think about that: what have they done to deserve access to the full report? Are they such worthy creatures, by virtue of being American citizens – perhaps – that all such reports should be automatically bestowed on them? Have they attributes of Gods and must therefore have every whim satisfied? Is it true –
This line of reasoning ridicule can go on for quite some time, once you take their wording seriously.
If pressed, I suggest they’d shrug and suggest it’s merely a figure of speech. My reply is that reflects the basic absurdity of some facet of their philosophy of extreme individualism, and the >ahem< apparent divinity which goes along with it.
Naturally, as chronic readers of this blog know or can guess, I’m in favor of the full release of the Mueller report. Not because I’m a God[1][2], or need to satisfy some intellectual / prurient interest, or some other self-interested, self-aggrandizing, or even grandiose reason.
But because I think the more information we have on the character of our President, shrouded as it is in lies and deliberate metaphorical fog, the better our country, as a whole, can make proper decisions about whether to cut his Presidency short – or to permit it to move on to a second term.
This may all seem akin to counting angels on the head of a pin, but let me draw a lesson from engineering: way too many times I’ve seem some subtle assumption or implementation decision that looked right, seemed right – and was wrong. And correcting that mistake rippled through the system like the waves of a pebble in a still pond, troubling the waters far out of proportion to the apparent size of the decision.
Operating from proper assumptions and philosophical underpinnings is far less likely to lead one astray. The self-entitlement mind-set evident in the subject of that email speaks volumes about the half-baked philosophy of those who wrote it.
1 Which would be a funny thing to claim for an agnostic.
2 Nonetheless, I’ve been proclaimed one an uncomfortable number of times, decaded ago. No kidding. Even in fun, it’s disturbing.
