‘Radicalized’
8th December 2015
The FBI has finally, with much sighing and moaning, admitted that the the San Bernardino shooters were ‘radicalized’.
Don’t you just love that word, ‘radicalized’? Sounds like a treatment — like sanforized, anodized, bastardized, caramelized, generalized, homogenized, etc. But the key aspect of being ‘-ized’ is that it is something that is done to you, not something for which you are responsible; not a free choice, but an Occurrence, like getting caught in the rain, or imbedded in carbonite by Darth Vader.
This is all a part of the Narrative, in which nobody who is a member of a Fashionable Victim Class is ever responsible for what they do, but rather are puppets being pushed along by the Evil Racist Sexist Homophobic Islamophobic society in which they happen to find themselves.
The chief intellectual defect of ‘progressives’ is this refusal to believe that people are free agents, who make choices and who are responsible for the results of those choices. (Hat tip to the Forces of History via Cultural Marxism.) If nobody is responsible (except Republicans, the ‘1%’ who don’t vote Democrat, and maybe the Koch brothers), then everybody is a victim, and as victims deserve hugs and money.
Unfortunately, being shot (or blown up) by a ‘victim’ has the exact same effect as getting shot (or blown up) by a far-right-wing neo-Nazi secretly-KKK NRA member. No difference — except in which direction the fingers get pointed.
This is the chief thing for which ‘progressives’ will have to answer to history: The denial of free will, the deeply religious belief that We’re All To Blame, and so none of us are.