Be TERRIFIED RIGHT NOW DAMN YOU

That’s what modern hysterics are really saying.

Be terrified along with me right now at my exact emotional pitch or I’m going to scream and point at you on the street Donald Sutherland Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style.

People who are scared want to be reassured.

People who are “scared” want you to be scared along with them.

If you’re not “scared” along with them, prepare for them to denounce you and question your moral commitment to humanity.

What’s the difference between those two, aside from the quotation marks? Quite a lot.

Genuinely scared people have a hard time controlling their fear. When we’re in fear, we’re in fight or flight mode. We say and do things quickly without thinking. We snap, we yell, and sometimes we get a little hysterical.

This is normal in a genuine fear response. Fearful people are grateful to have either the actual danger vanquished, or to learn that the calamity they fear is not actually going to happen. They breathe a sigh of relief.

”Scared” people are different. They’re not actually fearful, at least not in any genuine way that most people would agree is reasonable and proportionate to the circumstances.

”Scared” people are manipulators. Many of them aren’t actually conscious of that; they’re not going forth with a fully articulated intent necessarily. They may believe they are genuinely scared.

But they are not. They are acting out an emotional psychodrama that uses the imagery and affectations of genuine fear as psychological props. As theaters use an easy chair and a table with a doily to evoke a domestic family scene, “scared” people use histrionics and doom-saying to evoke an atmosphere of danger.

These are different projects.

Who are the “scared” people? In 2023, it’s largely liberals, progressives, Democrats. And also all the people who describe themselves this way, but who are actually Marxists and Communists.

In case you’re wondering, yes. I am characterizing almost 50 percent of the US voting population as Marxist or Marxist-sympathetic.

That’s extreme, Josh, you want to say. Is it? Having spent most of my adult life as a prog-lib-Dem, I now recognize that I was sympathetic to Marxist/collectivist/statist authoritarian politics. No, I didn’t know that my politics could be described that way, and I would have said what a lib-dem reader might be wanting to say to me right now: “That’s just a right-wing extremist insult.”

It’s not. I mean neither to exaggerate nor to insult. I don’t think 50 percent of the population is “psychopathic,” or irremediably corrupted, or evil. The vast majority of this 50 percent is misguided and manipulated in ways they haven’t been able to detect.

What are they “scared” of? This week it is—of all things—gas stoves.

The appliance that millions of Americans (and the world) have relied on for more than 100 years to cook their food, or to heat their homes in the form of a furnace.

They discovered this fear literally yesterday or the day before. When they were told that “a study found” that more than 12 percent of childhood asthma cases are attributable to gas stoves.

I’m not going to parse the study here. I’m not going to detail the problems with the study’s methodology (others have done so already). I’m not going to counter it with other studies.

I don’t want you to do that either, or to believe that you’re obligated to do that in order to have an opinion.

Draw up a chair a little closer to me. Here’s the deal: this is bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. I know it’s bullshit.

Common sense alone is enough to see through it. Aren’t I being sort of crude, un-nuanced, and anti-academic?

Yes. And I hope you will be, too.

Over the past 10 to 15 years all of us—you reading this, your dad, me, my friends—have been slowly conditioned into a new view of epistemology. We now believe that we can’t “know” things about the world around us without “a study” or “peer-reviewed data.”

Even those of you readers who agree with me and may be nodding your heads have taken on this epistemological view to some degree. I know this because I can see it in the ways you couch your comments with caveats and disclaimers in various conversational fora.

I know it because I fell into this trap myself along with most people around me.

By slow degrees, we’ve eased into believing that the most banal observations about breathing air, encountering viruses, or how one piece of matter affects another, require a Peer Reviewed Paper Recognized by Science.

This is new. As in 21st century new. It’s not something you remember from your childhood if you’re older than Generation Z.

Really turn that over in your mind, would you? I think you’ll agree if you give yourself the chance to step back and look at it as if you were an outside observer.

Isn’t it downright strange how diffident we’ve become about knowing anything?

Let’s walk through Gas Stoves Are Killing Our Children using only everyday, ordinary sense.

-Five days ago it would not have occurred to any American to fear their gas stove.

-The only thing that changed was media attention and Marxist “progressive” claims by agenda-driven “scientists”.

-The kind of people who are “scared” of gas stoves jumped immediately to proposals to ban them at the state or federal level. As in, the very day the “study” was pushed in the media.

-Somehow, despite hundreds of millions of homes the Western world over using gas cookstoves and furnaces for more than a century, no one ever noticed that it was making children have asthma attacks.

-Do you truly believe they were getting sick all this time, and that no one anywhere noticed it, and that no one anywhere drew a correlation to gas stoves?

-Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you’ve spent most of your life living in homes heated by natural gas, and most of your life using gas cooktops.

Tell me: Have you ever noticed your children, or anyone in your house, getting unusually sick or asthmatic? Do you truly believe it’s plausible that the 45 minutes you run your stove to make soup every day is causing chronic respiratory problems?

Do you believe that your house is hermetically sealed? Do you believe it’s actually airtight and doesn’t exchange air with the outside?

-Does your carbon monoxide detector go off in your house when you cook an egg on the stove?

-Blue cities around America have been bragging about their natural gas bus fleets for years. “This bus runs on clean-burning natural gas” is a common sign you can still see on city buses.

-Think back just a few years. Five or 10 will do, but think back 20 to be safe. Remember all those commercials and public service announcements about clean-burning natural gas? How it released many fewer pollutants than, say, power plants fired on oil or on coal?

-This was something lefties were on board with. You might have been one of them. Remember, it was just yesterday in historic terms that we all agreed on the (reality) that natural gas is one of the cleanest-burning fuels.

-Were they wrong all along? Did we just learn, just this week, that natural gas is a Big Dirty Nasty Polluter?

”Scared” people have a tendency to be “scared” by a number of things that, strangely, correlate to the aesthetic preferences of prog-lib-Marxist oriented people.

-Cigarette smoke. Anywhere, in any quantity. Even a whiff on a street corner is “harming my health”. Yes, these people did and do say that. Do you actually, genuinely believe that your risk of lung cancer increases appreciably because you had to smell a cigarette in the air walking by someone on the way home from the post office?

”Scared” people claim they do. That’s how they justify their actual goal: controlling others and looking moral doing it with things like smoking bans on city streets and in parks.

-Diesel fumes. Diesel was also recently touted (within the past 15 years, but also in the 70s because I remember) for its fuel efficiency. Suddenly, with no explanation, the miles per gallon are forgotten and diesel has become Bad And Everyone Knows It.

-Incandescent light bulbs.

-Then, compact fluorescent bulbs became Dirty, I think just last year in 2021?

-Human immune response, unprompted by vaccines.

It isn’t fully worked out in my mind yet, but I’m mulling an idea that there’s something about direct encounters with the physical world that disgusts and repels lib-prog-Dems. The less mediation by computerized technology, the less complicated and “high tech” a device or action is, the more such types seem to loathe it.