A real gem from Dr. Charlton, posted in response to Bonald's humorous post about insufferable Catholic sermons relating Old Testament attitudes toward leprosy to "discrimination":
@Kristor – “Just think if AIDS was transmitted that way. Think we’d have AIDS colonies? You betcha we would.”
Actually, we probably wouldn’t, not in Britain anyway. And this is a measure of the pervasive dishonesty of our society. The ruling elites would very probably deny AIDS was contangious, and claim that the people were dying from something else – discrimination probably.
When AIDS arrived in Britain, and the government was running terrifyng TV averts about icebergs of disease, and people very high up were genuinely concerned that there might be a wiping-out of the younger generation – nonetheless clear and vital facts were deliberately concealed from the public.
In particular it was stated again and again that *everyone* was at risk, nobody was safe. Later it emerged that hetero-sexually transmitted AIDS was almost 100 percent confined to a very small group of recent immigrants from certain parts of Africa, almost entirely living in London.
This was a high risk population, the government knew, but the UK public was never allowed this information, and was indeed fed upon lies – presumably some people caught AIDS and some died as a result…
It was an early example of the politically correct airport ‘security’ policy, where anyone *could* be a terrorist (even if such people never have been terrorist so far in the history of the world); so the checks are ‘random’ (yeah…) and include detailed spot searches of young children travelling in families (it happened to us!), 85 year old grandmothers etc. Meanwhile, known and obvious high risk groups waltz-through ‘security’.
Our ruling elites are serious about PC. Societal annihiliation from leprosy would, for them, be a price they were prepared to pay.
Yet it cannot be said that this is acting nobly, stoically, on principle; because they would lie about the reality – lie to themselves and lie to others.
If the elites were to say clearly – leprosy is an incurable and terrible disease which is contagious – nonetheless we should allow lepers to live among us as equals because discrimination is the worst of evils; and the result will probably be that eventually nearly everybody will have leprosy – including you and me and our children; but that we should nonetheless do this because we should act by the highest principles of morality and the highest principle is non-discrimination…
If the PC elite would say something like that, they that would be respect-worthy, so far as it went. To suffer, deliberately, in pursuit of high goals is noble.
Because that would lead to questions of where this specific non-discriminative principle of morality comes from, and why it should be primary; and to this question they have no answer, because there is no answer.
But the ruling elites don’t, they don’t ever state honestly the truth as it is known – not even to themselves in private.
They would say that the threat of leprosy was exaggerated, mistakes in diagnosis were made, it was possible to make transmission unlikely, maybe some people were resistant, that it is actually curable, that the problem with leprosy is exaggerated and most due to prejudice against people who look strange, that it was a disease mostly of the poor and some ethnicities – they would raise up a dust-storm of psuedo-doubts and red herrings until real leprosy had disappeared and been redefined as being an *arbitrary label* imposed due to prejudice.
Because that would lead to questions of where this specific non-discriminative principle of morality comes from, and why it should be primary; and to this question they have no answer, because there is no answer.
Of course there is an answer: Full body condoms, provided at tax payer expense.
Posted by: Steve Nicoloso | February 14, 2012 at 12:07 PM