Sentimentality

Sentimentality is not a true emotion, it is a weaponized sanctimony. I suspect many North Americans have very few emotions but tons of sentimentality. True emotions humanize and broaden us, sometimes painfully as many negative emotions can be true, but they are so rarely seen in the media (social or otherwise) that I suspect many people are horribly sentimental yet emotional dead.

Princess Di, Fort McMurray, that hockeybus crash - were all media-managed tragedies that evoked endless sentimentality (and filled quite a few bank accounts) and took on bizarre proportions. Any war footage that features dead kids - but NEVER kids killed by the US - fills the same function. The limbic system lights up, the serotonin releases and the neo-cortex goes blank. When it operates on a cultural scale you must be careful because it is dangerous.

But never, ever tell a sentimental person this. Rage and sentiment is all they have and if you won't humour their twee, unctuous sentimentality then get ready to be a target of their barely suppressed rage.

Just look at this:
https://twitter.com/NoLore/status/983159952264003584

I've said a million-times more cynical things every day of my life.

That was quite a kickback she got for expressing something that was actually true about it.

On the dead kid topic, when I watched "Vladimir Putin - America's Greatest Threat" they showed a lot of dead kids. All killed by Russian actions of course.

A simple quote prompted 3+ days of misogynist vomit, death threats and attempts to get her fire. Here is the offending statement:

I'm trying to not get cynical about what is a totally devastating tragedy but the maleness, the youthfulness and the whiteness of the victims are, of course, playing a significant role.

A few seconds of neo-cortex processing work would register this as a fairly mild and objectively true statement. That media coverage and moral panics are deeply effected by race and gender are not controversial ideas. Is the hate-mob really suggesting that Canadians are so absolutely free from these core influences that they play no role in cultural events?

It's weird to think there is going to be a whole generation of young men who spent their vital energy attacking women on the internet - (plus all those deeply creepy adult men join in with them).  What are you going to tell your kids someday?

"What did you doing the dark decades when the US launched a dozen insane Wars of Terrors, Poppa?"

"I attacked opinionated women from the safety of my keyboard! I sent them pictures of my dick! It was glorious! I'll never forget the proud day that a young woman suggested that pronouns should be gender neutral and I called her a dirty %$^& and destroyed her with my superior logic. [pats biceps]"

" "

"Hey! It was either spew misogynist vomit or let them have their opinions! Something needed to be done to save Canada from politically correctness!"

"OK - Can we leave our bomb-shelter yet?"

"No, the radiation count is still too high"


It's hard to imagine that the formative years of their manhood are being devoted to join mobs that screaming obscenities at female game-reviewers, leftist women and students.

Here is a very, very old male rule that apparently no one has taught them (or they've never read in all those 'How to be a Man' books that they gobble up):

• You pick on women and children - you're a coward.
  
  
• You pick on women and children from the safety of the shadows or the internet - you're disgusting.
  
  
• You join a large mob to pick on women and children from the safety of the shadows or the internet - buddy, you need to seek help, you're on a path toward absolute moral darkness.
  

These rules aren't complicated and they maybe old-fashioned but they are unfortunately necessary - because the strongest lesson I learnt from teaching criminology for a decade is that all men have a nugget of misogyny in them so don't feed it. It's too addictive - do not indulge it. If you doubt this advice, please head over to your local prison and talk to many men who end up there.

The fact that indulging 'kill the leftist women' misogyny is basically the Right's current election platform will do real cultural damage for generations.

If you doubt this advice, please head over to your local prison and talk to many men who end up there.

So the right-wing, internet hate-machine radicalized another young North American male to murder people with a car. Now in Toronto. Just like Charlottesville.

This is where all that spewed misogyny leads. Here's your reactionary "sentimentality" in practice.

Here's some cynicism: Nuke these Toronto suburbs that seem to spawn a disproportionate number of misogynistic serial killers (Paul Bernardo, Russel Williams) and Incel terrorists while always voting murderous austerity-ghouls like Ford & Harris into power. Or give these places to the US or build a wall around them.

The states can have them. I did my time down there and it was more than enough.

I took this picture while I was training in Toronto. To me it captures how I was feeling about being there.



Expensive car parked in handicap parking spot. RBC logo hovering over it. Gas station directly behind it. And everything but a few pine trees are cut done.

So...would those tweets and volatile responses be further picked up and passed around by many types of media, during and after those 3 days of misogyny?

Is the media simply cashing in on whatever they (or invested others) want?

At some point somewhere after the hockey player tragedy, some powers that be must have agreed to make it a focus or join a cause, perhaps?