A Judge having sentenced a Malefactor to the penitentiary was proceeding to point out to him the disadvantages of crime and the profit of reformation.
"Your Honour," said the Malefactor, interrupting, "would you be kind enough to alter my punishment to ten years in the penitentiary and nothing else?"
"Why," said the Judge, surprised, "I have given you only three years!"
"Yes, I know," assented the Malefactor--"three years' imprisonment and the preaching. If you please, I should like to commute the preaching."
--
I don't know why I do it, but I cannot look away from the slow-motion trainwreck that is the so-called mainstream media. Where there was once news there is now a continuous shrill torrent of preaching and opinion. Articles in The New Republic and National Review might as well have been written by people from different planets. Seeing friends and colleagues flying apart into their ideological camps has been both amusing and distressing. The amusement I confess is that base reaction that physical comedians tap into when they slip on a banana peel or have a hammer drop on their head. The distress is contemplation of a future where we have lost our collective minds.
I've seen otherwise friendly people literally not able to communicate stalemated by their entrenched certainty in their position and the evil wrongness and deception they believe of the others. I've seen people make decisions based in part on how Trump relates to the situation in the most bizarre and incoherent ways. For instance, someone decided not to go back to Taco Bell ever again because Trump had tweeted a picture of himself eating a Taco Bell taco salad. You're not going to do business with someone who sells Trump a taco salad? Does Trump even buy his own food? And what is the person taking orders at the Taco Bell supposed to do? It's nuts. Yo quiero common sense.
Further distress comes from being (pre)judged and labeled, assigned to one side or the other based on some inclination, or worse, mere observation. Think it's profoundly weird to the point of incredulity that a PhD research psychologist doesn't know how a polygraph works? Well, I must be a sexist and a rape-apologist and a right-wing fascist Trump loving deplorable. Look on a claim of never (ever!) having drank to the point of forgetfulness from someone who apparently started getting together with his buddies for "skis" in his teens with some skepticism? Well, I must be some lefty libtard postmodernist Marxist hater of Western civilization. Clearly.
In hindsight, I wonder what the signal-to-noise ratio is in reportage where the authors feel compelled to assign labels to the people in their stories. It seems these labels are not there to inform, but rather to shape the battlespace. To implant prejudice in the reader. Sadly, hyperbole and misuse have rendered these labels increasingly useless. Just what constitutes a fascist these days? Anyone who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton? A socialist? Anyone who is in favor of any form of a welfare state no matter how small or efficiently administered. While accurate of some people's thinking, it's bunkum. And increasingly dangerous.
Not every "labeler" necessarily thinks much about the labels used because they aren't meant to be accurate or descriptive but rather to signal which side the labler is on. The consequence of this mechanism of virtue signaling is to further erode any precision of meaning for the words. This leaves us slouching toward an Orwellian unlanguage of dystopia. Dead will be ideas leaving only beliefs and dogma.
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