Sexual Harassment at 12.

Noam Chomski observed that our politician’s call for us to support our brave fighting boys somehow automatically moves the debate away from reason to agreeable fuzziness. We stop thinking about their role in the rights and wrongs of the conflict and see them as purveyors of warm sliced agreeable bread. It’s a trick as old as organised conflict itself. On our part it requires nothing more than sentiment. One’s moral, ethical and logical senses are bypassed by some cheap undelineated emotion. If one refuses the agreeable bread those caught in its cheap emotion say, “so you don’t support our boys?!” or “you’re saying they’re dieing for nothing, their lives are worthless!” On the plane yesterday a puffy pink shapeless foulmouthed slag abused her four-year-old son into a three hour tantrum. Two hundred passengers knew there could be no reasoning with her; we just had to sit and hear a child’s life being ruined by her shapeless emotions. Recently I’ve read several horror accounts of casual sexual abuse by boys in school from teachers powerless to do anything. Their tactics are a carbon copy of the above. ‘It’s all just a game, a bit of fun’ and who whoever is against fun must surely be a miserable narrow-minded hypocrite. And the girls if they allow it are slags or if they don’t they’re frigid bitches. The illogic of their thinking is impervious to change by this same trick of moving any debate away from ‘what are you doing in the rights and wrongs of the situation?’ It becomes a sort of cognitive immunisation against the processes of rational thought. It’s truly frightening to see the moral, ethical and logical disciplines built up over centuries so easily and quickly corroded by cheap cognitive trickery. And now Egypt is falling beneath the same spell with fifty deaths, probably the first of many more. Who next will fight for their right to not listen, to die for the right to not think?