Frankie
Hello, Dr. Kaspar. I’m sure you heard about the popular right-wing pundit who was killed yesterday. What are your thoughts on the situation?
Dr. Kaspar
Well, I’m certainly not disappointed that he’s dead.
As far as I can tell, he was a hateful and bigoted man (to say the least).
I’ve heard again and again that violence isn’t the answer—that it isn’t who “we” are. I tend to laugh when I hear that. This country, the United States, was founded on violence. I’m sure there were people who said that violence is never the answer when it came to the British, the South, and even the Nazis. And yet…
Though, I will say that these examples don’t justify violence. I’m not exactly keen on taking ethics advice from the US. And, as you know, I don’t really believe that anything justifies violence other than the one actually doing the justifying. There are individuals who justify things and, instead of owning it, will credit/blame that justification on something else.
Onto a different tangent, I think about the paradox of tolerance. I want general tolerance to be preserved, so I deny tolerance to the generally intolerant. For example, if I try to be so tolerant that I tolerate both a Nazi and a Jewish person, then the intolerance of the Nazi abuses my tolerance, and the Nazi eradicates the Jewish person. Thus, by extension, why would I ever expect a Jewish person to tolerate a Nazi?
All of that is to say that this pundit was an intolerant bigot, and I am not sad to see him removed from a society that I want to be (generally, not absolutely) tolerant.
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