We need more people to speak out. We need to shove the extremists back under the rocks they breed in and fumigate the cracks with light until their eyes burn out of their sockets and the machetes fall out of their wretched grasp.
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I find that I just don’t have the fight in me that I used to. I can dip into those threads (you know the ones) and comment here and there, and I for damn sure have opinions.
Arguing with idiots takes a toll on me. Maybe we should just start duplicating the really juicy threads in the Lounge where we know people that have brains are about.
I realize this was maybe not what you were posting about. Attacks on journalists is a troubling matter.
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Well, speak up, then. Let’s hear it.
Too many of us read with the intent to agree or disagree. And a subset reads with intent to lionize or demonize the writer. To me, that’s just another form of extremism. The cure for extremism is light, as in exposure. Sometimes it’s exposure to packs of rabid rats. Sometimes it’s exposure to new information.
The logical extreme of reading with ill intent is what’s happening in Bangladesh and other countries in that area, which is why I posted the article. It is sick and it’s sad that thoughtful writers have to die such senseless deaths.
That’s not to say that we should read without intention. Intention is different. Read for information. Like how many of us watch Fox news occasionally? Don’t you want to know what the foxes are doing before they raid your henhouse? I do. I don’t agree with them, but I want to know what they are up to. This requires suspending my intent, just temporarily, turning off the critic and turning on the critical thinker. We can go back to nursing another Mother Jones article later on. There’s no prohibitions.
But if all we do is stand around and approve or disapprove, damn it, that shit gets old fast. Thank goodness hackings to death are rare, but I see it along the same continuum of overjudgmental reading. FEED THE RAGE MACHINE!
No journalists should be dying, period. Opinions need to be heard.
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Okay, I’ll stop being such a shrinking violet then 
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good. I like you better that way.
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two more Bangladeshi writers have been killed? They’re right on track. There’s been a slaying about once a month there this year of secularist writers who are speaking out against extremism and violence.
Seems like par for the course.
I’m outraged out at this point.
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