I found this video so compelling:
SJWs seem to have a peculiar talent for pattern recognition that is being employed for trivial causes and ultimately dangerous ones.
I mean, who the hell would notice that blue necklace?
Well, clearly the same SJWs who “see” Trump’s hair in the new Firefox logo.
The same SJWs who I believe may have legitimate grievances (about fathers and families and, well, Harvey Weinstein) but find it safer and more satisfying to direct their fury at Trump or this week’s villain.
It’s the leftwing version of those tedious Christian weirdos who thought the Proctor and Gamble logo was “satanic.”
We rightly scoff, and yet, there’s something almost Jungian about this way of seeing, a “gift” that could surely be wielded in a more creative fashion:
As arts critics or poets, for example, for such similarities are the thing of metaphors and similes and particularly apt jokes and, perhaps, a deeper understanding of the world.
But we barely “allow” such “jobs” to exist anymore unless said critic or poet are willing to adopt and dispense the latest p.c. “wisdom.”
It’s the same with conspiracy theorists, my own bugaboo — they “see” things, “patterns” and “connections,” but… to what end? Again, it is easier and more thrilling to be a basement conspiracy theorist, an autodidact amateur “engineer” or “ballistics expert” or “forensics examiner” or “police detective,” than a real one. That conspiracy theories provide their theorists with the illusion of work and its satisfactions and importance is surely one of its most sinister aspects.
I think of Carl Sagan quoting Malcolm X, being bowled over by the ability of ghetto “numbers runners” to peform and retain thousands of calculations in their brains, and wondering what they could have done with their lives if this ability had been steered in a more productive direction.
How many of these people are the Alan Turings we could really use to win a war, but are instead the very Nazis they think they’re fighting?
(Thanks to Laura Rosen Cohen for helping me clarify my thoughts on this via email.)
