And one for Discoverseattle, just to be fair.
I may be risking my life by telling you this, but Discoverseattle's indifference only adds to the problem. It may help if I begin my discussion by relating an innocuous story in order to illustrate my point: A few days ago I was arguing with an uneducated merciless-type who was insisting that we have no reason to be fearful about the criminally violent trends in our society today and over the past ten to fifteen years.
I tried to convince this prurient, satanic schemer that Discoverseattle possesses no significant intellectual skills whatsoever and has no interest in erudition. Heck, it can't even spell or define "erudition", much less achieve it. Now that I think about it, Discoverseattle has a knack for convincing prissy carpers that cultural tradition has never contributed a single thing to the advancement of knowledge or understanding.
That's called marketing. The underlying trick is to use sesquipedalian terms like "anthropomorphologically" and "photochronographical" to keep its sales pitch from sounding short-sighted. That's why you really have to look hard to see that an armed revolt against Discoverseattle is morally justified. However, I assert that it is not yet strategically justified.
At the risk of shocking you further, I shall point out that if Discoverseattle is victorious in its quest to identify political and religious groups that are its political enemies and re-label them as "venal monomaniacs" in order to justify operations against them, then its crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity. Discoverseattle has for a long time been arguing that free speech is wonderful as long as you're not bashing it and the ostentatious scallawags in its army of pusillanimous bullies.
Had it instead been arguing that careerism, in this case, is a tactic tied to a broader strategy of granting it the ability to introduce changes without testing them first, I might cede it its point. As it stands, the leap of faith required to bridge the logical gap in Discoverseattle's arguments is simply too terrifying for me to contemplate. What I do often contemplate, however, is how it will probably never understand why it scares me so much. And Discoverseattle does scare me: Its op-ed pieces are scary, its revenge fantasies are scary, and most of all, its favorite tactic is known as "deceiving with the truth".
The idea behind this tactic is that Discoverseattle wins our trust by revealing the truth but leaving some of it out. This makes us less likely to convince the government to clamp down hard on its excuses. Quite frankly, I've heard Discoverseattle say that it is the way, the truth, and the light. Was that just a slip of the lip or is Discoverseattle secretly trying to drive us into a state of apoplexy? Please do not stop reading here, presuming that the answer is apparent and that no further knowledge is needed.
Such is truly not the case. In fact, I'd bet no one ever told you that Discoverseattle's mind has limited horizons. It is confined to the immediate and simplistic, with the inevitable consequence that everything is made banal and basic and is then leveled down until it is deprived of all spiritual life.
Since Discoverseattle claims to know more than the rest of us, I'm sure it's aware that when it hears anyone say that it is hardly surprising that the idea of letting it control, manipulate, and harm other people is, in itself, vicious, its answer is to expand, augment, and intensify the size and intrusiveness of its gestapo. That's similar to taking a few drunken swings at a beehive: it just makes me want even more to open students' eyes, minds, hearts, and souls to the world around them.
I have two words to say about Discoverseattle's exegeses: ignominious poppycock. I enjoy the great diversity of humankind, in our food, our dress, our music, our literature, and our forms of spiritual expression.
What I don't enjoy are Discoverseattle's hostile wisecracks which replace the search for truth with a situationist relativism based on abhorrent vandalism. To conclude, talking about Discoverseattle in the highly charged vortex of extremism is always burdened with agitation and diversion.
