Sorry, Your Feelings Don’t Actually Matter

Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier

After House Speaker Paul Ryan turned out the lights on the childish sit-in protest some House democrats staged last week, the crybaby caucus of the democrat party took its show on the road. On Wednesday, June 29, House democrats staged 40 events across the country with 60 representatives participating in an effort to find and sustain the public’s enthusiasm for oppressing citizens and annihilating U.S. Constitution and more than 200 years of American jurisprudence.

The New York Times lavished attention upon one such event, held in Farmington, Connecticut – because, Connecticut with its Sandy Hook connection is almost as good as Orlando, and a shorter plane-ride.

“This state has become an emotional center of the gun control debate — and an example to those sick of waiting for Congress to act. In 2013, after Congress failed to restrict access to firearms, Connecticut enacted its own ban on many semiautomatic rifles,” reads a portion of Emmarie Huettman’s piece.

Of course it has become an “emotional center” in the civilian disarmament debate. Emotion is the only thing the Left has for leverage on this issue, since facts and reality routinely put the lie to all their assertions.

The intellectual and philosophical bankruptcy of these congressional democrats is even trickling down to the state level, as evidenced by Connecticut state representative Brandon McGee, who, according to the NYT piece was “gesturing enthusiastically as he described what last week’s protest meant to him.”

“That was monumental, I think it started the new civil rights movement.”

Hyperbole, much?

Of course. Again, the only thing driving the entire gun-control movement is emotion.

“’Our babies die every day,’ said Steve Harris, a retired firefighter and former member of the Hartford City Council, who was moderating the forum. ‘We have our Sandy Hook moment every day,’” Huettman ended her piece with that quote from not-the-bassist-and-founder-of-Iron-Maiden.

Again, hyperbole much? There’s a “Sandy Hook moment” every day on the mean streets of Hartford, Connecticut? Really?

Truth doesn’t matter anymore, clearly. Words are now only tools to be used to elicit an emotional response from the unwitting, to stir them to action based on what sounds and feels good, not upon sound logic and reason. While the anti-self-preservation crowd has mastered the appeal-to-emotion out of necessity, they are not the only practitioners of this dark art. Clearly, this particular logical fallacy has become one of the most popular in use today, and it is used by the Left on a variety of fronts.

Bernie Sanders’ entire campaign is based on a series of appeals-to-emotion: the economy is rigged, the one-percenters are enslaving us all, college is too expensive, health care shouldn’t be for-profit, etc.

No substance, just empty words to illicit an emotional response.

This idea that emotions are somehow a valid mechanism for making an argument seems to have sprung from academia. Gone is the emphasis on teaching people how to think; it has been replaced with teaching kids exactly what to “think,” based on how they feel. The idea that college students need a “safe space” so that they won’t be “triggered” by “micro-aggressions,” is an example of this emotionalism run amok.

And running amok it is, friends. Just ask Justin Timberlake.

Timberlake recently made the mistake of tweeting that he was “inspired” by a string of lies and nonsense spewing forth from the gob of Jesse Williams, an actor on the TV series Gray’s Anatomy who was accepting an award at the BET Awards this past Sunday. The twitterverse soon exploded and Timberlake was decried for being the wrong color to have an opinion, positive or negative, on the matter. His effort to apologize only got him lampooned in a USA Today editorial. “He just doesn’t get it,” the editors said.

Welcome to 2016. Maybe Timberlake can try to bring logic back? Sexy never went away, near as I can tell, but logic has been MIA for decades. Nobody likes logic; it’s cold and impersonal, like the character of Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek TV series. Logic forces us to see the world for what it really is, and not what we wish it was, or how our most comforting narratives tell us it is. Logic forces us to reject simple “solutions” to complex problems when we’d rather embrace the proposal as the magical panacea it seems to be, so long as one doesn’t think too deeply on it. Logic tells people very uncomfortable things about their deepest-held convictions, even the very foundations of their religious beliefs.

And, worst of all, Logic doesn’t give a damn about anyone’s feelings.

So, we’ve essentially banished logic from the public discourse to the greatest extent we can manage, and people are trying each day to remove yet more of its inflexible dictates from the human condition. In its place all that is left is emotion. The problem with emotion is that the lines between empathy, jealousy and hatred are thin and easily blurred and manipulated more easily still by clever speech.

Until we as a society decide to wake up and bring logic to bear on the popular lies being peddled by mountebanks of every stripe, we will continue to be misled, manipulated and cheated by charlatans.

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