{"id":6208,"date":"2015-01-06T00:05:57","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T08:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/?p=6208"},"modified":"2015-01-05T17:34:38","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T01:34:38","slug":"two-sides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/2015\/01\/06\/two-sides\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Sides"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are always two sides to any conflict. But sometimes that doesn\u2019t mean that both sides have a point. Sometimes one side is flat out wrong. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are two sides to every story\u201d has become something of a mantra for journalists. It is not uncommon to be told the sad stories of our enemies, how much they\u2019ve suffered, how miserable their lives have been. The downtrodden, impoverished young minority member languishing unjustly in jail; \u201cnobody knows the trouble\u201d he\u2019s seen. As if that makes robbing the liquor store and gunning down a couple of customers (who are rich and not minority) a reasonable reaction to his state, or at least makes it comprehensible.<\/p>\n

This \u201ctwo sides to every story\u201d is not held to with consistency and rarely is the lack of consistency recognized, because in the echo chamber, there is no inconsistency, ever. The one in the right, the one who is justified is always the minority member who is poor and who has endured hardship. The one who is not poor, is not a minority, and is not downtrodden in that special way deserves to suffer at the hands of the victim who rose up and struck a blow against inequality.<\/p>\n

But, despite the narrative that is always true regardless of the facts or reality, I have yet to see \u201cthe other side\u201d of racism ever presented, or \u201cthe other side\u201d of pedophilia, or the other side rape. Thankfully I have yet to see a story trying to justify the perpetrators of child abuse or rape. But that failure to give the other side of the story of rape demonstrates that the \u201ctwo sides to every story\u201d is a clich\u00e9 and widely misapplied by journalists and pundits. The unexpressed thought that \u201cthe other side\u201d whatever that other side is, must have legitimate grievances or reasons. And that unexpressed thought is where the flaw is centered.<\/p>\n

The operative term being \u201clegitimate\u201d grievances or reasons. And of course we know that while yes, there probably is a point of view that the Nazis and child molesters hold that for them justifies their actions, we really aren\u2019t so interested in knowing what those might be because we know that they cannot possibly justify their reprehensible actions. Even the most feckless journalist and pundit knows on a fundamental level that sometimes the other side is simply wrong or insane or evil. Everyone understands that there really are bad guys in the world.<\/p>\n

There is the world that we wish for and then there is the world that is. We would do well to develop our philosophy to match the world that is, rather than the ideal we wish could be. As we think about improving the world, we would also do well to keep in mind reality. The worldview of too many strike me as beautiful sentiments that fit reality as well as the hobo song, Big Rock Candy Mountain:<\/p>\n

On a summer day in the month of May a burly bum came hiking
\nDown a shady lane through the sugar cane, he was looking for his liking.
\nAs he roamed along he sang a song of the land of milk and honey<\/blockquote>\n

Nice people will say things like, \u201cwhy can\u2019t we just all get along\u201d or \u201cwhy can\u2019t we just live in peace?\u201d As if the sentiment alone will fix the problem, as if people would \u201cjust wake up\u201d and \u201cgive peace a chance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there are monsters out there. A serial killer is not interested in your pleasant sentiments. The members of the drug cartels in Mexico and other places south who kill people with regularity, cut off heads, and do other horrific crimes are not going to be swayed by us holding hands and learning to sing in \u201cperfect harmony.\u201d Hashtags #givepeaceachance or #endviolence repeated on Twitter, pretty memes reposted and \u201cliked\u201d on Facebook will not change the behavior of the evil and putting a flower in the barrel of a thug\u2019s gun will not slow down his bullets in the slightest.<\/p>\n

When it comes to the situation in the Middle East, there are fundamental things to understand about the conflict, the first being that the Israelis are not the ones standing in the way of peace. The Israelis are not the problem. Blaming Israel is like blaming a rape victim.<\/p>\n

So who is to blame? Bottom line: Israel\u2019s enemies: those who shoot rockets indescrimately into Israel, those who kidnap children and murder them, those who walk into markets and detonate bombs, those who board busses and machinegun the passengers, those who compare Jews to pigs and apes, those who make Mein Kampf a bestseller throughout Gaza, the Palestinian territories, and the Arab world, those who believe that Jews kill gentile children so they can drain their blood and use it as an ingredient in Passover matzas. Those who teach their children to hate Jews, whose textbooks and teachers teach the children that Jews are an infection on the world that needs to be eradicated, parroting the same language the Nazis used in the 1930s. Those who publish newspapers, print books, broadcast on radio and television the daily instruction, the calls for the destruction of Israel from its politicians and religious leaders, who cry for jihad and the murder of Jews. Few who blame Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East care to think about inconvenient little details like Mein Kampf<\/em> remaining a perennial best seller in the Palestinian territories, together with the infamous forgery called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion<\/em>, which is accepted as true by most Palestinians. Or when the wide-spread anti-Semitism is mentioned, it is explained away using language remarkably similar to someone trying to blame the rape victim because of how she was dressed: they brought it on themselves.<\/p>\n

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There are always two sides to any conflict. But sometimes that doesn\u2019t mean that both sides have a point. Sometimes one side is flat out wrong. \u201cThere are two sides to every story\u201d has become something of a mantra for … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_s2mail":"yes"},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6208"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6209,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6208\/revisions\/6209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nettelhorst.com\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}