Why pandering to identify politics doesn't work: self serving pessimism

That this environment of hate and othering spawned someone like Brenton Tarrant, nurturing his Islamophobia and aggression to the point that he deemed it his "duty" to raid two mosques and kill 50 innocent worshippers is by no means surprising. Tarrant is not an aberration, he's not an exception; he is an integral part of the collective "we" in New Zealand, Australia, and the "West" - just like the followers of Trumpism are part and parcel of modern-day America.

This was the worst mass murder to ever occur in the history of New Zealand (or Australia). These sorts of attacks are almost entirely absent from both NZ and Australia. It is absolutely the definition of an aberration, an exception.

Now, I think there are real issues with anti-Muslim sentiment in Australia currently (maybe NZ too, I don't live there). We've had a succession of violently xenophobic right-wing governments who have recklessly and cynically courted white idpol to shore up electoral success in the sort of backward swing-seats that tend to proliferate in "representative democracy".

I live across the road from a mosque. The fences are covered with flowers. This is a scene that has repeated in all the countries called out here: in NZ, Australia and the US. The average person is absolutely aghast, and there is a deeply-felt, honest drive to assert that Muslims are absolutely seen as anything but 'outsiders' — that they are beloved, welcomed neighbours and co-citizens. The same thing was seen in countries like Iran following September 11 — countries that had every right to celebrate a misfortune striking a foreign power that persecutes them, but the average person has no interest in such ghoulishness.

This article is the typical misanthropy of the elite who view the masses as dumb animals incapable of real empathy or thought. It represents an awful myopia: one that looks at petty acts of bigotry, or vile acts of murder, and resigns itself to more of the same, insists that this is the true human nature, and absolutely ignores all the solidarity, warmth and mutual support that always follows this sort of tragedy. It's a mentality that would rather scold others for their failings than to join with them in struggle and mutually work toward something better. It's dead-endism, and utterly worthless.

You can just feel the genocide thrumming like an old Olds 442 warming up on an ice-cold morning throughout that article, eh?

Watch out whitey!