I think it was The Reverend William Sloane Coffin jr. who pointed out that Muslims in Afganistan, in Iran, elsewhere didn't have to make the either-or choice of whether to hate the Soviet Union or the West, they could choose to hate us both for different or the same reasons. I think something like that false dichotomy is at work in the dynamic of choosing to believe that guns or video games are responsible for the epidemic of violence as seen in El Paso and Dayton and, within the coming days if not while I'm typing this, certainly in some other place in the United States, who knows, perhaps a quarter of a mile from where you're sitting or I'm sitting, right now.
It doesn't have to be Trumps or Colbert's alternative that either the providers of guns or violent video games are responsible BOTH CAN BE RESPONSIBLE. They don't even have to figure in every mass shooting for violent role-playing video games which have certainly been used by some of the mass murderers to hone their imaginations if not their actual shooting skills to be getting people killed.
A false dichotomy is so commonly used in our discourse that people aren't even aware that there might be more than two alternatives and that the falsely presented choice doesn't have to be a choice at all. One of the tactical uses of a false dichotomy is to force an opponent in a debate to take an extreme position that is vulnerable to attack or which is disadvantageous to the ultimate purpose of the opponent. That false dichotomy is rampant on the American left when it comes to things like media promotion of violence, of racism, of bigotry and the rest of what has led us Trumpian fascism. We never needed to empower malignant speech, lies, racism, etc. to protect freedom to tell the truth, to promote equality, TO PRODUCE A DECENT LIFE FOR EVERYONE. We didn't need to enable and defend and protect the enemies of equality, leading to their empowerment by millionaires and billionaires who could harness that force to dupe voters, gain power, install a gangster government for their own enrichment while using the violence and terror they, themselves, enabled to further their political ambitions.
The reputation of people on the left that they have an overblown view of their own intelligence is in no other way proven than in how we got suckered by the use of such false dichotomies. No matter how many facts you have, no matter how reliable those facts are, no matter how much sense they make, if you allow lies free reign, those lies are what will reign in real life. That is the lesson of the left in the past hundred years, I am afraid that is about to become as clear in the United States as it did in the Soviet Union and its occupied countries, including Afghanistan, China, Nazi Germany and Austria, Imperial Japan, in myriads of fascist and red-fascist client states of other states.
You can't create a false right to lie without eventually being destroyed by the lies you enable. The authors, publishers, babblers and scribblers, lawyers and judges and justices who produced that false right, many of them of the alleged left are as responsible for this as the gun industry and Republican-fascists. The fascists were smart enough to co-opt it for their own purposes even as the lefties preened in their superior free-speechiness and defended the fascists right to lie us into hell
There is a real and important difference between the ideologies of traditional, American style liberalism which is all about equality, of egalitarian democracy, of the right of everyone to a decent life and that of our various opponents. The case for American liberalism is far, far harder to make to individuals than that of the right because liberalism costs you something to achieve, especially if you are or can be duped into believing you can come out on top instead of on the same level with everyone else. That is why the right wing can benefit from things like this false dichotomy and flourish under it. They don't need integrity to get what they want but equality, democracy can't be had whenever dishonesty holds sway. Liberals have to be as cunning as serpents to remain as innocent as doves. They can't be as stupid as we've been gulled into being for the past half century.
Update: I'm told that the elective eejits of Eschaton apparently can't make the simplest of distinctions I have here.
Do I look like I care?
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