On Friday the 13th of April 2018, Minnesota congressional member and DNC Deputy Chair Keith Ellison was feelin’ himself. Whilst speaking to progressive candidates in training he said, “Did you know that in Missouri and in Texas, and maybe other places, maternal mortality has risen. Women are dying because we are losing elections. We don’t have the right to lose a damn election.”
Aside from Ellison doing what progressives do and assigning to the world a new ‘right’, that of being elected, Ellison invoked death. People are gonna die. Pregnant women are already dying, according to Keith.
Progressivism likes to define itself as the smart ones. An essay by Ron Elving via NPR, “Progressivism has historically been associated with science, rationality and an approach to government and society reliant on knowledge and empirical methods.”
Empiricism and science can be a sticky wicket. In and of themselves they’re not but, when you play fast and loose with facts, sticky wickets they are. You see, the Texas death rate claimed by Ellison was actually wrong. Texas overstated mortality by not using the more accepted CDC criteria. The Missouri claim? It wasn’t about maternal mortality but other root cause health concerns related to lifestyle such as obesity. Even so, in the Texas study, it was noted, “Because pregnancy-related deaths are so uncommon, the frequency of the box being checked in error can significantly impact the maternal mortality rate reported.” A check box…
To Representative Ellison, facts were not useful. Death was. Universal healthcare was ultimately why he invoked a death meme.
Death is like a marquee. No one would’ve cried had Old Yeller snapped out of it with tail-a-waggin’, CSI would have been markedly less interesting and consider that the whole horror genre wouldn’t have existed at all!
That’s largely the point; horror. Death is an ‘ultimate’. Death is final. If people are dying, you have no choice but to act. Death is a big deal. Dying is a bigger deal than spilling your morning Starbucks. Though some mornings, not by much.
Death is a bad argument. Let’s call it a new logical fallacy; Argumentum ad Mortem. An argument to death. That is to say; an argument based on death as a fallacy.
Progressives have a bad habit of invoking this style of argument. Not unlike the stifling of speech on campuses, a ‘death’ argument is a means to skip the argument. A means to avoid debate.
Still our leftist friends like death in so many other ways.
In the soul-sucking cosmos of social media, bad political memes abound. Within my mostly mundane Facebook feed are friends foody snaps, bulldog puppy videos and nitro burning fuel funny cars. Within that, one of my lefty friends shared this meme, “Stop pussy-footing around about impeachment. It’s time for a serious discussion about Execution for Treason.” Meme-tastically, this call for execution goes further, “Not only for Trump, but also for most members of his cabinet, most of Trump’s “advisors”, some accomplices in various agencies, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.”
That’s calling for the execution of some 30 plus people, not including the rather nebulous ‘agency accomplices’. If you’re not progressive then, well, Kill ‘Em All!
In a previous missive, I’d referenced UC Berkeley’s George Lakoff’s discussion on framing. Within this post on Lakoff, writer Zoe Williams defines progressivism thus, “The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy (emphasis mine), interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation.” Progressives are logical, scientific and feeling too (or so I hear). It must be hard to carry that weight of perfection. In an imperfect world, the progressive Sisyphian task of being perfect must be overwhelming.
But Trumpworld mass execution?
For the left, Donald Trump and conservatives generally, are not deserving of empathy. Like an 8 year old with a magnifying glass on a sunny day, ‘fry those little (conservative) ants!’ To the mind of the meme-maker at least, eviscerate the Trumpers for the crime on not being a lefty.
And Facebook thought Diamond and Silk were dangerous?!
On April 17th, the nation lost former First Lady, Barbara Bush. While former presidents and first ladies alike sat shoulder-to-shoulder to mourn the loss of a substantial public figure, Fresno State English professor Randa Jarrar was having none of it. With all the literary verve of a steam locomotive, she penned this tweet,”Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal, F— outta here with your nice words.” Further she taunted with her invincible tenure status when people called for her firing, which then blew up her work phone line. Her response? To tell Twitterville that her work number isn’t working and redirect to a mental health and suicide crisis line. Sigh…
You stay classy Fresno State.
I’ve long held the belief that no matter whom is deceased, you don’t celebrate their death. You don’t grave dance. No matter how evil and vile the decedent, it’s not a time to rejoice. Don’t get me wrong, a world without Hitler, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein is a much better place. Biblically, in Proverbs 24, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles”. Accordingly, I don’t rejoice in death.
Jarrar spent the following five hours on Twitter gleefully defending her abhorrent dispatch. That is, up and until her university president publicly pointed out that tenure doesn’t mean she can’t be fired. She has a full right to her free speech, but university donors are also free not to donate.
Families mourn, a body is laid to rest but Professor Jarrar’s noxious bent only serves as support the left’s cultish relationship with death. Death only matters when you can score political points.
In early June 2017, discussing a GOP healthcare bill, House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi foreshadowed the great purge to come, “We do know that many more people, hundreds of thousands of people (emphasis mine), will die if this bill passes”. Mere months later, she referred apocalyptically to the GOP Tax plan as, “This is the end of the world.”
Hot tip of the day; if you’re buying what Nancy’s selling, prepare to bring out your dead.
Why the abiding progressive cultish devotion and veneration of death? It seems overwrought to declare leftist adoration of death, yet appears prevalent throughout the ideology. At the very least, it’s a darned popular subject.
Recent argument for gun control? Death of kids. Healthcare? Death of many. Tax reform? Death of everyone. Liberal’s losing elections? Death of women. Madonna not happy with Trump? Blow up Trump’s White House (which I’ve heard she’s thought an awful lot about).
Why is death always on the lips of progressive leftists? I’ll make up another concept; Reductive Ultimatism.
The genesis of Ultimatism comes from Communist Revolution Bolsheviks ordering underlings to be radicals. Within current politics, this is the tendency to go to extremes. Overlay this with the reductive logical fallacy of oversimplifying, and what you have is: Simple sloganeering.
Losing an argument? Just shout ‘DEATH!’. That’ll win the day. Short and sweet.
Foregoing data and relying on a lazy and oversimplified argument are the calling card of the left. Doing so allows the progressive to avoid real life data, real life results. The achilles heal of leftist progressives is the complexity of our society. Economic theory does not fit tidily on a bumper sticker. Ask complex questions of climate change, you don’t get a scientific answer, you get ‘settled science’. Even then, the sales pitch supporting climate change is that folks are going to die.
Very few of life’s issues are so simple. The complexities of this world is not fodder for bumper stickers. If only we could simplify the world to a concise slogan. The cult of death in the leftist worldview doesn’t see the value of a diverse set if differing views. Vacant actual data, their absolutist arguments just don’t work.
You know what does? ‘People are gonna die!’. Again, let’s just call it Argumentum ad Mortem. It’s a fallacy but it’s all they’ve got.
