I think I first heard this when Ken McLeod quoted Ian M Banks: two of the best Scottish SF writers of the now dying generation. (Stross, shut up. You are my age, and you were born in England. We have just begun to die).

The polite version is that you should hate anyone who considers the death of another as just the cost of doing business. Particularly if you are thinking of ideologues. No I am not going to apologise for the language here. I don’t think The culture would work, because Banks and do not share a Hobbsean veiw of humanity, but I share his sense of injustice. Something that the current crop of fools that call themselves progressives have lost.

“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying” — Iain Banks, 1954-2013
….
Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that sane human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

There is one problem with this, and that is the libertarians and technocrats do not want to murder anyone and leave anyone crying. You cannot say that about the left.

At first, like everyone else, you are ignorant. Then you find your impetus that makes you ask why. People come to this from all different vectors: gender relations, academia, politics, whatever. You start asking why and keep asking why and eventually you uncover truth. A lot of it. You take the next step: argument. You argue in favor of the precious truth you unearthed and the precious civilizations it could build. But when you find a person to whom all reason is ignored, all rational inquiry met with defensive snark, I suggest you take another stride in mental framework: Pity.

When viewing from a higher plane, you see the level of agency that most people operate with does not accommodate the acceptance of wide swaths of truth. The honest pursuit of truth first requires humility. For many, the slice of humble pie that it would require is too large, the psychological cost of accepting their own diminished status in the face of the truth is too great. There are certain things that they just can never accept. When they rebel against a traditional arrangement that would allow them some semblance of dignity and instead flail comically trying to claim power in a world that they could never reasonably have any, it is time for pity.

But the trouble is not that people are illogical and as foolish. It is that they cause damage, and people suffer. This can occur on in the conservatives and the progressives, and generally happens when one tries to make people better.

Which is God’s job, not ours.

An obvious example, butit makes the point.

To radical feminists, who have been the driving force behind many tectonic societal shifts in recent decades, that’s a sign of success: they want to tear down the institutions and power structures that underpin society, never mind the fall-out. Nihilistic destruction is part of their road map.

But, for the rest of us, the sight of society breaking down, and ordinary men and women being driven into separate but equal misery, thanks to a small but highly organised group of agitators, is distressing. Particularly because, as increasing numbers of social observers are noticing, an entire generation of young people—mostly men—are being left behind in the wreckage of this social engineering project.

But this means people must be compelled away from choosing to love, to have children, to building a life together: to embracing wifedom and husbandry. We must not find joy in helping the other and healing the broken, but instead of breaking others, so we can remain nicely unoffended in our isolated, atomized lives.

Pity them, for they murder and make children cry. And the one good thing about Gamergate is that they are being called on this. They are building their own hell: let us tell them there is another way but not force them to join us, and make our assemblies more unrighteous than they need to be.