Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:30 PM | March 02, 2025
meme

Suicidal empathy is a thing. And we are awash in it in the West. 

Empathy is one of the most important traits in human beings. Being able to understand the people around you is not only vital for survival--failure to see the others' point of view is disastrous--but it is also key to morality. 

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But when empathy becomes the dominant emotional lens through which people see they wind up behaving in stupid, destructive ways that ultimately lead to self-destruction. And, to be honest, the likely destruction of all that is good around you. 

There are a million examples of this phenomenon, but a few examples suffice to drive the point home if you are willing to think things through. The collapse in livability in cities like Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London, or my own city of Minneapolis. 

Voters and leaders in this city will give you endless reasons for why they have let their cities fall into ruin and become cesspits, but they all boil down to some version of "people are hurting and we need to help them."

How's that working out? The people who are being "helped" suffer ever more, with drug overdoses every day, thousands living on the streets, dysentery spreading, and the police spending all day reviving people dying of overdoses. Along with that comes the decline of everything good about these places. Everything gets locked up behind plexiglass, businesses and the middle class people leave, tax revenues drop through the floor compounding the problem, and so it goes. 

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Here in Minneapolis/Saint Paul we have invested many billions of dollars into light rail transit, with the assurance that it will make our cities bustle and bring neighborhoods together. We will become the Portland of Minnesota (back when Portland was not a cautionary tale). Walkability! Little shops everywhere. 

Instead, after only a few years, the trains are open-air drug markets and unsafe to ride. I know it was predictable because, well, I predicted it. 

During the pandemic, empathy was weaponized to create the closest thing to a police state seen in the United States. People died alone, with their family members prevented from seeing them, all to "slow the spread" of a disease that was created due to suicidal empathy ("we must create deadly viruses to study them and prevent deaths!). A censorship regime blossomed, people were beaten up and arrested for not wearing masks, schools were closed, harming a generation of kids who were at no danger from the virus, and the entire federal and state government apparatus was turned against anybody who even questioned any of this. 

The migrant crisis is a perfect example of weaponized and suicidal empathy. We are lectured to be compassionate to migrants--many of whom in fact deserve compassion, and many of whom do not--and the result is hundreds of thousands of children sold into what amounts to slavery, cities overrun with gangs, hundreds of billions poured into unsustainable welfare support for people who never intend to contribute to our society, and housing crises that immiserate everybody. 

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Not to mention the increase in crime and the free flow of drugs. 

Yet people persist in lecturing us that we must pay these prices because others have it worse, which amounts to saying that no good things should exist because not everybody has them. We must lift everybody else up by dragging what is good and decent and aspirational down. 

We are wealthy, and that is unfair. So we must destroy what we have in order to atone for our having created something good. 

And so you get stories like the one above. French leftists feel the need to virtue signal about helping others, only to discover that "helping" others requires your own suicide. What you have is suddenly taken away. Instead of increasing the amount of good in the world, we get this: the collapse of something that once had value. 

I don't know whether the theater in question did anything particularly good, but obviously there was some value to some people related to its existence. A grand gesture of welcoming those in need has turned into a suicidal disaster in which the "good guys," or those who thought themselves good, have destroyed something they valued without having anything to show for it. 

Is the world a better place? No. People are sleeping on the floor in an old theater laughing at the idiots who invited them in. Crime has skyrocketed, rapes are rampant, and the do-gooders are much worse off. Everybody but a few malefactors is poorer for the experience. And things will get even worse. 

And yet...the cycle will go on, because the empathy worshippers will demand the cycle repeat and declare anybody who objects to giving up the value of their society--whether it be arts, in this case, or commerce, or safety, or hope for the future--is a cruel person. 

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I believe in helping people, but helping people requires adding to the net good in the world, not redistributing a diminished pool of wealth and quality of life to equalize everybody in misery. 

Whatever nasty things you can say about the hypocrites at Martha's Vineyard, after they virtue signaled their love of illegal immigrants and hugged them all, they promptly called the National Guard to get them the hell off the island. Nobody opened up their house, however much they claimed they welcomed the interlopers. 

They sent the migrants to a military base. Conservatives laughed at them for their hypocrisy, and rightly so. But at least they weren't stupid enough to let their little nirvana turn into a cesspit to prove their morality. 

At least they didn't commit suicide to prove a point. 

Unfortunately, they kept asking us to do so instead, so they could watch the bonfire from the comfort of their homes. 

SUNDAY SMILES:







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BEST OF THE BABYLON BEE:


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BEST OF THE REST


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AND FINALLY...


The future foretold:

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