Mother Jones
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Let us engage in some civil conversation with our friends across the aisle. First, here is David French on terrorism:
There are a few terror-related memes that crawl all over the left side of the internet — all of them designed to minimize, to downplay, the jihadist threat. “Bathtubs are more dangerous than terrorists.” “Toddlers are more dangerous than terrorists.”…One needs to consider capacity and intent. My bathtub isn’t trying to kill me. I don’t need the government to protect me from my furniture or my firearms. I can be a responsible gun owner. I can step gingerly around my allegedly dangerous furniture and learn to keep my head above water in my deadly bathtub, but the average American can know next-to-nothing about ISIS’s next terror plot.
This meme annoys me too. Unlike French, I think it’s pretty obvious that the threat to Americans from terrorism is objectively fairly small. But bathtubs don’t fight back or change their tactics. Terrorists do. This means that a few minor regulations can make bathtubs safe forever, but keeping terrorism from metastasizing really does require vigilance. We may disagree about how much vigilance, but the comparison to lightning strikes and shark attacks is kind of silly. We should knock it off.
(On the other hand, it’s a little rich for French to count “60,000 casualties in the struggle against jihad” by including 3,000 from 9/11 and 57,000 from the Iraq War. If there were ever a poster child for the danger of overreacting to fearmongering about terrorism, the Iraq War is it.)
Next up is David French on this week’s episode of Saturday Night Live:
While the attacks on Trump got all the press, there was one skit this weekend that actually took aim at progressive pieties. How did this send-up of sappy leftist commercials make it through quality control? Watch and enjoy:
There’s nothing unusual here. Liberals have a long and rich history of making fun of their own excesses. Here are a few famous examples from past decades:
You can find thousands more like this with little effort. But you won’t find many examples of conservatives making fun of their excesses. I don’t quite know why this is. Maybe conservatives take themselves more seriously than liberals do? Or they’re afraid of their most extreme faction while liberals aren’t? Or mockery just doesn’t appeal much to conservatives regardless of topic? I dunno.
POSTSCRIPT: Yes, this whole post is mostly just an excuse to put up a few funny comedy bits. Guilty as charged.
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